Theatre en vol

«Theatre en vol represents one of the most significant experiences of Italian street theatre. With its imaginative capsizing and engaging performances, in which the actors and the amazing theatrical machines are the mediators of dreamlike voyages and fantastic suggestions, the company has gained recognition all over Europe. As a point of reference for young actors and as a source of ideas for the realization of important events such as “Girovagando” and “Sogni a Spazi Aperti”, and thanks to its important activity, the company has given an irreplaceable, substantial and profound contribution to street arts». With this splendid motivation a commission of experts of the Region of Piemonte granted theatre en vol in 2008 the prestigious award “Torototela”, allocated every year (until 2010) for the enhancement of street arts.

24 years have gone by, since in 1989, Puccio Savioli created the first theatrical machines for the performances “Up there wings don’t rust”. The history of the company, which became an association and subsequently a cooperative, began immediately afterwards. Since then it has received many other important recognitions, not only on the Italian level.

The two founders, around which the first nucleus of the cooperative was formed, Giuseppe Savioli, known as Puccio, actor, visual artist and stage designer, born in Sassari (Italy) and Michèle Kramers, Dutch actress and director, born in Djakarta, who spent most of her life around the world, shared a human and artistic journey with their associates, enabling them to present their performances all over Europe and beyond, to Northern Africa and to the Arctic Circle.

The story of the first performance is slightly similar to the company’s own story: the story of a couple of inventors and dreamers, who with their clumsy yet graceful creations attempt to take off from the ground to reach the realms of dream and utopia.

A story which is also told in other forms in “Orme attorno alla costruzione di una torre”, (Traces around the building of a tower) created in 1994, in which the builders are engaged in the construction of an infinitive tower, or in “Macchin…azione e altre diavolerie”, created in 1999, an itinerant performance in which the aim of a strange crew consists in finding the ideal place for the realisation of a fantastic “walk in mid-air” thanks to an ingenious theatrical machine.

Up to the latest performances such as “B.A.U. – Brigade of Urban Harmonisation”, in which thanks to new expressive forms, especially music and by the use of “alternative” percussions and electronic sounds, the “liberation” of a group of workers, who have become alienated by an extremely mechanical dimension of existence is staged or such as “Buskovic Uolkin’ Serenade”, a light-hearted pseudo-Balkan musical parade, in which an aspiring bride searches for a husband she will never find

In between the company has realised a great job in vertical theatre, in particular with “Phoenix” created in 2006, a “site specific” performance which is reconstructed every time in relationship to the architecture of the sites, and in which the facades of the buildings are used by actors, dancers and acrobats as surfaces on which they present dreamlike and surreal scenes. On the other hand the company created awesome performances such as “In the sign of Guernica” (2002) and “Gernika” (2007), performances which were inspired by Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece, during which the figures of the famous painting are reconstructed as grand theatrical mobile machines wheels, which invade the scene.

Beyond any official recognition however, it is above all the all over encountered enthusiastic response of the audience to its performances, its festivals and its training courses, which spur theatre en vol onwards on its adventure of social art, through which it reaches out to people and restores the possibility to live society and territories in an open, free and creative way.